Defying canonical isolation:

Poets Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane

Canonization is a process that makes Canadian writers accessible to the general public because their work becomes readily available in anthologies. However, canonization also estranges writers from the general public because their presence is most often isolated to the pages of these anthologies. When writers Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane came to read at SFU, the poetry which students study in the classroom grew into a more human dimension. The poets defied the isolation canonization can create by making contact in the classroom. Students soon found out that Crozier and Lane weren't the high-falutin', over eccentric, ridiculously self- absorbed literary types might have thought. The poets answered students questions regarding poetry and the writing life, and what they had to say was consistently surprising and grounding for those who attended the reading on June 26th. The following interview is composed of questions posed by the students of Professor Alexander Hart's English 356 class and myself.

Student: It's really great to be able to put a face to your name. It puts my mind in a different mode and I really got a lot more out of the reading....

Patrick Lane: Yes, it makes you realize that Wordsworth masturbated. Well, maybe he didn't....

Lorna Crozier: Oh, I hope he did.

Lane: Well, Blake did for sure. Seriously, seeing readings places poetry in the real world. I grew up in the interior of BC and figured all of the poets were dead. At the back of all the anthologies there was a section called "And Other Poems" and that's where all the Canadians were. Then I read "David" by Earl Birney-I remember thinking, geez, I love this poem. It was all about a guy climbing the Rockies around Banff. I thought, "this is real-I've been in those mountains." And then when I discovered in the early 60s that he was alive and living in Vancouver, I was completely knocked out by this. I sent some poems to a magazine at UBC and they rejected all of my poems-but it was Earl Birney who wrote the rejection letter to me. He said all of the editors are students and he apologized for them. He said they weren't so bad and that I should keep working at them. I thought Birney was much deader than Wordsworth.

One of the reasons I came to Vancouver to become a writer was because of that incident. Both Birney and Dorothy Livesay really supported me as a young writer. They said go here, you can get a grant there (you can't get grants anymore I'm sorry). I think it was Robert Kroetsch that said to you [points to Crozier] that if I don't support the writers that come after me, then in a sense, my life has been worthless. He said he only lived if other writer's existed to keep the poem alive, to keep the stories alive....

Crozier: To keep the language alive.

The Peak: You've both traveled extensively. How do you translate your traveling experiences into poems?

Lane: Well, Canadian writing is fascinating in that a lot of Canadian writers have traveled-think of Al Purdy, Dorothy Livesay, Margaret Lawrence, Earl Birney.... I went to South America in the 1970s and came back and wrote a book of poems about the experience. I didn't want to take advantage of the world I had come out of. What I really wanted to do was to explore the person I had been when I was there (which was a complete stranger-one who hadn't learned the language, but had learned to catch the bus, learned to order beer. Basically that was it, I was a Norte Americano... nobody).

I'm not sure how the foreign informs us. It's a place that can't always be entered. I didn't know what Canada was until I had traveled internationally. When I finally came home to Canada, I understood where I lived. Somehow that foreigness had informed me. I realized for the first time in my life what it was to be a stranger, and through that process I learned where it was that I belonged. I knew that the mountains, the rocks, the trees, the lakes, the people, etc. were mine.

Student: Does a poem for you start from an image, an idea or an emotion?

Crozier: All of the above. Poems come from everywhere. Sometimes it's a rhythm, sometimes it's reading a line of poetry somewhere and having that spark my mind, maybe someone mentioning a storm window, say, evokes a memory and takes you back somewhere you hadn't been in a long, long time.

Earl Birney described a poem as an interior itch that you have to scratch. You get into a state and you know where you're going, but maybe you don't yet know exactly where it's all going. Maybe it's a rush of love for my cat and the feeling that he's going to die soon. It might be anger at my lover. It might be the great blue heron that stands beside our pond that I catch a glimpse of once in a while. An idea-thinking about Noah's ark and the fact that those five people were on water not for forty days and nights but 150 days and nights. What did those people do in that cramped, smelly and dark place? That'll get me going.

Lane: A poem is something that resonates inside you. I think to be a writer is to be able to allow that resonance to take place inside you.

Crozier: Often it's the sound of words that does it. The way poetry gets in touch with what we didn't know before is that we often let sound guide us in our writing of the poem (rather than logic). So then you're operating from a pre- logical or post-logical position. Our thoughts are so limited. There's something about thinking with the body, with the breath that happens when you write a poem.

Student: How do you know when a poem is bad?

Lane: As far as failed poetry goes, I think the writer knows, I think you know when you are being false. Lorna and I have argued (talked) about this. I think there are a lot of second rate writers who think what they do is great-and I think that's great, let 'em go ahead and do that. Really good writers know when they are full of shit.

Crozier: That's how I've always felt. I'm glad to hear you've come to agree with me.

Lane: No I've always-look at how she holds my thumb to shut me up!

Crozier: Patrick used to argue that bad writers know they are bad.

Lane: How come if I hold your thumb you don't shut up?

Crozier: It works with men but not with women.

Lane: It's a penis thing, isn't it?

Later at The Peak newspaper office:

The Peak: I keep hearing people talk about poetry as a stepping stone to prose....

Crozier: I find that really annoying. It's almost like, "when are you going to grow up and write your novel?" Poetry is one of the most difficult art forms and its possibilities never fail to intrigue me. I keep finding new things I can do with it. My last book [A Saving Grace] was the retelling of a novel in poetry and I hadn't ever done that before.

The Peak: On the subject of Mrs. Bentley and writing the partner poems for As For Me and My House, were you in any way daunted by the project?

Crozier: I was completely daunted. I took me a long time to admit to myself that I was writing the poems. Then I kept on thinking good grief, what an audacious thing to do-partly because the novel is a very poetic one, one based on rhythm and repetition and music, in a sense. So it wasn't as if I was taking a novel and turning it into poetry. I thought the reaction might be "why did she bother doing this?" because the story is told so brilliantly and so beautifully to begin with.

The Peak: Maybe that's a reflection on the purpose of poetry. As For Me and My House being prose, you told it in a way that was unavailable to prose.

Crozier: Yeah, and with all respect, there were parts of the novel that I wanted to change. I wanted to populate the town with more characters and stories that were available in the text. Part of the strength of the novel is its one line, and its claustrophobia and I wanted to show the woman in the well and the man hanging himself in the barn. I wanted to flesh it out a little more-not because Sinclair Ross needed to do that, but because I needed to do that. I also wanted to expand on sexuality as well, to give more body to the character of Mrs. Bentley. Again, it wasn't a fault in the novel, it was just something I wanted to try.

The Peak: Professor David Stouck mentioned to me that in two of Sinclair Ross's other novels the motif of the woman down the well and the dead baby also appear.

Crozier: Isn't that funny, I never thought of that and I read those books a long time ago. There is definitely the dead baby in the field of wheat-but I didn't think of those consciously until you raised that. Maybe they were planted somewhere in there.

The Peak: Lorna, you come from Swift Current. Patrick, you come from the Okanagan. Does the place you originate from inhabit your work or is it the place you inhabit now that inhabits your work?

Lane: The formative place that you come from lives in you forever. It becomes an archetype and you place all of your work there. You find yourself describing different worlds and you see how these descriptions echo the world you came from. Lorna does that in her poetry all the time and I know I do that as well. When I reach down to the emotional centre from where the poem comes, its populated immediately by the flora and fauna from where I grew up. Poems that I think have that kind of authenticity that I like, ring of that place I'm coming from.

The Peak: Do either of you ever feel a sense of competition concerning your writing?

Crozier: No we don't feel competition at all. We just delight in one another's successes. A good poem that Patrick writes-well, I'm thrilled by it. I really have to try and distance myself when I see him up there reading a poem because he's no longer simply the man I live with. You forget sometimes when you want someone to empty the dishwasher or when it's undecided whose turn it is to take out the garbage, what a talented person you're living with. It's quite a treat to sit in the audience and look on him as just a poet. Sounds kind of corny but it's true.

Lane: Yeah, he's not a bad bloke.

The Peak: What do you think of the canon of contemporary Canadian literature?

Lane: I think it has to be re-appraised. Gary Geddes has been the arbiter of the canonical taste now for almost forty years.

Crozier: Can-copy allows for every professor to create their own "anthologies" and gives writers the money they deserve for the work that is being copied. It's really going to blow things open. If you have 1,000 professors each creating their own anthologies there are going to be 1,000 different poets and we won't be so reliant on 15 Canadian Poets x 2 or 20th Century Poetry and Poetics.

Lane: Ideally, the great reader is always revising the canon. It was a much more canonical world when I was growing up. We really had to work like dogs to reach outside of it. There was no one to guide us.

Crozier: Not only was there a gender imbalance, but there was a class imbalance and a racial imbalance. All of those things were going on in that rigidity. Milton Acorn has been left out of every major Canadian anthology. He's an absolutely brilliant poet but he did not write within the class system that is supporting all of this canonization. He made professors feel uncomfortable. He should have been in all the anthologies and now he can.

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